It's all about coverage... Choose the carrier that provides the best signal where you live and in places you normally go..

The 3G/4G iPad allows you to access the net whenever you want without having to tether to another device or without having to sniff around for a wifi hot spot. The cellular equipped iPads also come with a true GPS receiver allowing you to pick up signals from the GPS satellites. The wifi only iPad doesn't have a GPS receiver. You can add an external Bluetooth GPS receiver to a wifi only iPad, but its far more convenient just to have the receiver built in to the iPad in the first place....

Numerous independent speed studies show that AT&T consistently has faster data throughput than Verizon. Not true for telephone service though, but no one cares about that on an iPad. All that said, it really comes down to where you want to use the iPad. For my money, and it is my money, I travel a lot and have had consistently good service with AT&T. Not many cities offer 4G/LTE for any service but new ones are being added every day.

Your choice of service for the iPad is unrelated to who you use for telephone service, totally separate contract.

In addition to deciding what carrier, I feel like this is going to be my only option to get cellular, although if I do get cellular I would probably only use it while on vacation. Thats why it's a hard choice to fork out the additional money or not.

I did simply because I had an iPod touch that my wireless went out of, oops...now it is just a gloried MP3 player. At least with cellular, I'd have a backup way of getting info on it/using it.
Plus the GPS chip doesn't make it cost that much more than the wifi version of the same gig. It was worth it in my eyes, never a question of "if" but who? My 2, I got Verizon but you can only use it with Verizon & the GSM they use since it is different technology than the rest of the world, which uses the same as AT&T. So my 3 is an AT&T model.

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